


Congealing at the Door

by May



Category: Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magnus Archives Fusion, Architectural Horror, Blood, Blood Drinking, Gen, Malkavian (Vampire: The Masquerade), Vampires, eldritch location
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-10-11 15:51:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20548727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: You find a new door and get lost in the stomach of something you've never seen before.





	Congealing at the Door

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NetchSlayer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NetchSlayer/gifts).

> Thank you for your awesome requests, I really enjoyed writing this. I hope you like it!

You live somewhere else, now. In some ways, it’s a small apartment, with dusty windows and a filthy kitchen. They’ve left you blood packs in the fridge and a laptop full of all the new words you need. Beyond that, you live in a hungry city. A sleek beast turned feral, baring its fangs and the wet, pink corridor of its throat. But it might not be you it wants to eat.

The paper on the table told you the key was ‘sunrise’ and you’ll never see another one of those, but you’re seeing so much more. The wires twitch overhead when you drink from a pretty doll in a slick dress, hidden between buildings, a mouse in a hole too small to fit a cat’s paw. Blood like rain on parched earth, but not like a king’s meal. Still, it’s the most you’ve found that you can make your body sing so far. Less so the rambling men, and the rats. Rats are just rats.

You leave her to stand, her strings cut, heavy in her shoes. You’ll come back to her when she’s recovered and returned to the House of Janus, where you might find her dancing. It’s fun to draw them in while they dance.

Your head speaks to you; it tells you about blood and bones and the maggots that long for your flesh. They writhe and twitch with rage at your very species, you can tell.

Santa Monica is tense and coiled as you return home, where you know that the Jester Prince will speak to you. Blood settles in your gut, warming you from the inside.

Usually, your head doesn’t speak to you so loudly when you’re at home. Perhaps it just has nothing to say, there, where there are no liars to beware of or dolls to drink from. The mailbox pops open to give you money, before you close its mouth back up. You head up the narrow wooden stairs to your door.

There is another door, fitting perfectly into the old wood panelling like any other. Which is ridiculous, because you know that whole apartments can’t just move into buildings by themselves. You giggle at the thought. It echoes in your mind, and you think that your head just might be laughing with you. Or back at you. You stop because maybe they can. Perhaps the building can open up extra eyes and mouths whenever it pleases.

The door, like the other doors, is plain and flaking green, the hinges marred. But the handle is a glistening silver. Your mind sparkles at it like chimes in the wind. Your head mutters to you, something about hanged men and also butcher’s calves and then mother…but you press against the door, anyway. It opens up, clicking and swinging back, and you enter, your footsteps loud against the floorboards, and then they’re quiet.

Quiet because you’ve stepped onto a threadbare carpet in a dark corridor. The walls are decorated with frames and are lit sporadically, the light catching off the edges of the frames at angles. The end twists off to the left. You smell white confusion and dark desperation; there are people in here, dotted around the place. You don’t think there’s any kindred but there are other things, instead, things that aren’t real yet are real at once.

You’ve been to a basement where a man stole limbs, and to a house where children died and died again, so you step inside, and let the door swing closed behind you. Something shifts at your arrival, a hideous worm twisting and tightening around itself. It makes your fangs itch. Your head mentions evil crouching, mutters about missing eyes, and then laughs.

The frames in the corridors turn out to be mirrors, their glass bulbous and strange. They reflect each other, tossing the light cast on them back and forth between them like an endless ballgame. They try to catch you, but they can’t morph you. The worm is twitching. The floor is reproachful as you head to the end of the corridor.

The next corridor is the same as the first, full of mirrors and bouncing light. Your head giggles, the worm tightens again, and people are making a pattern in your mind. They move in lockstep; each one thinks they’ve broken free but, no. You tilt your head, curiously. The scrabbling fear and desperation is potent and interesting, but useless to you. You can’t feed quietly on a screaming vessel.

You pass through about five or six identical corridors, tiptoeing on the worm’s back as it tries to throw you off. Sometimes you pass to the right as it flails indignantly. It’s hot, too, like inside a warm and festering gut. Sometimes you hear somebody on the other side of a wall, a mewling animal, scratching frantically at doors. You stop and listen, resting your ear against the wall, until it gets annoyed at you.

After about two dozen twists and turns, you start sympathizing with the rage of the maggots; you are HUNGRY, and you didn’t think to bring any blood packs with you. Your head moans and whimpers about vicious beasts, and the quiet blood in your veins starts to bubble. The worm tightens and obediently turns left, and you wonder if it might be so hospitable as to feed you.

She’s in the next corridor, stumbling on aching feet and flinching away from the mirrors. Her face is tear-stained red and her hair sticks to her sweaty forehead. She is the most pathetic doll you’ve ever seen, and you’re so hungry you could drink her until there’s just a single drop left in her veins. It would be a reprieve for both of you.

She blinks at you, a baby bird blind in the nest, and you smile like you’re bringing her a plump grub. You let her amble towards you, until she sags against you, warm and feverish, her skittish pulse against your dead chest.

“Thank god you’re here,” she sobs. “I can’t believe he got me again.”

“Sssshhh,” you say, smooth and gentle. It’s wonderful how you can do that, now. “The worm cannot catch the baby bird.”

You carefully brush the strands of hair from her forehead. She rests her clammy cheek against your cool palm, her mouth close to your frigid wrist, and sighs. You could feed her your blood and steal the worm’s toy. You could follow her to see if that meant she could leave and allow you to keep her in the city that feeds. But you’re hungry and, besides, if you look closely, you can see that she is not a bird but larva.

You lower your mouth to her exposed neck, break the skin and drink the vitae. Your blood settles, your beast is mollified, and your head merely coos. It’s good, the most precious wine. You bring her to the point where death can only be seen at the end of a winding garden path.

You pull away and her head lulls forward, her heartbeat slowing to a sleepy patter. You take her by the shoulders and rest her against the wall, in between mirrors. Unconscious, she escapes for just a little while.

“Take care, little one,” you say. “You’ll grow, soon.”

As you continue, you know that the worm is angry, and the floor seethes beneath you. You see the end of the corridor twitch as it flails. You lick the remains of the blood from your fangs and wipe your mouth with the back of your hand, and then you lick that, too. You will storm the worm’s heart.

There are more people in here, crawling and stumbling in a way that creates a shifting map inside your head. You skip for a while, feeling the worm wince as your feet spring against its insides.

Four or five corridors away, you meet something else. It’s huge and full of bones, and all of its eyes squint at you as you enter. It’s looking for something, but you don’t have it, so it settles. You nod in greeting as you pass it and it shifts its bulk at you in return, blinking.

“Alright?” it rumbles.

You don’t see anybody or anything else for a very long time. The worm has settled into an impotent miasma, and you can’t feed on anybody else to bother it, again. You don’t know how many hours you’ve been in here, but you don’t really mind that; the worm can’t nibble on your lifespan. Your head starts to hum to you, maybe so you don’t get bored.

Finding the worm is unceremonious; it’s in a corridor like any other, adorned with lights and mirrors. Your head speaks to you about snakes and double mouths. You aren’t sure if you’ve found it or if it finally decided it wanted to meet you. As it stands between two mirrors, you see that there are three of it, each one of it different. The mirror on the left is swollen until the worm is stretched, as clawed and fanged and irregular as Los Angeles, itself. This is the one that eats, though you don’t yet know what it eats.

The one in the middle is like the one on its left, except folded in on itself like a sleeping bird of prey. It is tall, with golden hair and blue eyes. You think not of worms but misshapen dolls.

“What are you?” it trills. Its voice echoes, sonorous around your head. Your head responds with talk of fangs and beasts before you do. But it cannot hear that, because it waits, fixing you with unblinking eyes.

“A bird who feeds on worms,” you say. “Yet, I enter the stomach of one.”

It laughs, a shaking, grating thing that drowns out your head, but you can tell that your head does not like the sound of it. You hiss between your fangs.

“I’m not a worm!” it says, and it grimaces too wide for its face. “Why would you confuse me with the filth?”

“The maggots long to trap me, too.”

It tilts its head and considers something. “I think there might have been a mistake,” it says. “I don’t know what you are, but I can’t use you.”

“I am inedible,” you concede.

You peer into the mirror on the right. There, in that reflection, is a young man, unembellished by the swell of the mirror. He has the golden hair of a painting, and the simpering eyes of a waiting blood doll. Something blooms in your mind, broad vistas of a world of which you still have no knowledge. But you understand one thing, now.

“Are you still angry, Michael Shelley?” you ask. 

It widens its eyes and shows all of its teeth to you. “How do you kn-”

You cut it off. “Did you know that the Mother of Eyes is dead?”

It smiles. “Yes, I did know,” it says. “But that isn’t the point.”

You step towards it and it watches you. Not like a wary human or even a bristling vampire, but like it’s watching a cat stalking along a wall to catch prey. You press a hand against its face, and it does not flinch. Its skin is dry and unliving, though not like yours is unliving. It is not cold. Perhaps this skin was never living skin.

“Michael Shelley,” you say. “Do you have blood?”

And before it can respond, you bite. The skin breaks like crumpling paper, and blood still bubbles up like opening a sluice on an old river. The blood tastes like none you’ve drank before; it doesn’t make your insides sing, but neither does it repulse you.

The worm known as Michael Shelley is still in your arms as you continue to drink. As you do, you feel the entire maze of corridors around you pulse and writhe. It spits out everything it holds as you consume it. You drink down confusion and fear, flashing bright and dark on your tongue. The unknowable becomes known to you as you swallow it. Your head howls and cackles and mutters and screams and you can’t tell word from word.

You drink and you drink and you drink until all that is left is the lost boy. And he sags as you pull away, falling to the floor as you let him, blond hair curled around his face, eyes closed in slumber.

Beyond him is the door, so you open it up to the light of the apartment building where you live. You stand for a moment and know the city. It still wants to eat as it did, before. You turn back to see that the door has vanished, leaving behind the old wall. You lean against it and let your latest meal sink into your dead blood. The worm has twisted away, unconscious and turn onto its back.

Your head hums and tells you of coffin run-off, before it twists around itself, like the shell of a deadly snail.


End file.
